Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 17. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 22, and to all Wikipedias on July 24 (calendar).

CirrusSearch was removed as the primary search method from Wikimedia Commons and the Spanish (es) Wikipedia due to a high server load. The plan to enable it on the Dutch (nl), Japanese (ja), Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias was also postponed to a later date. [1][2][3]

The tool that stores information about languages (CLDR) was updated to its latest version. You can still help translate language names into your own language so they can be used in the sidebar and other places. [4]

Tablet users visiting the mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will be able to use a special version of VisualEditor starting on July 31. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu. Feedback is welcome. [8]

All windows in VisualEditor have now a new design. Main action buttons will always be located in the top bar and will use simple words rather than icons. [9]

You can now easily open links inside the link editor, for example to see their target. [10]

Several bugs related to the positioning of the cursor around some items (like images and references) were fixed last week. [11][12][13][14][15][16]

Future software changes

It will soon be possible to watch individual discussions in the Topic namespace rather than whole pages for talk pages using Flow. [17]

You can give comments about the new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [18]

An IRC meeting to organize Pywikibot bugs will take place from July 24 to July 27 on the channel #pywikibot on freenode. [19]